San Anselmo's Hidden Valley Elementary students take day to innovate

Hidden Valley Elementary students take day to create their own projects

All school year, Hidden Valley Elementary School students have gone by the book. They sat at their desks, listened to their teachers, and studied what state guidelines prescribe.

On Wednesday, it was time for them to do their own thing.

The San Anselmo school held its school-wide Innovation Day, allowing students to come up with projects they would like to work on — either solo or in a small group — and then do them.

What ensued was about four hours of arts and crafts, video production, hammering nails, and all forms of ingenuity bursting from children's imaginations.

Fourth-graders Rowan Campbell, Devin Finnane and Michael Skyvara collaborated on a "60 Minutes" television spoof they called "30 Minutes," in which they played characters who were supposedly interesting people — but were really doofuses.

They were partly inspired by a "60 Minutes" segment they watched in class, and partly by an at-home practice.

"I watch '60 Minutes' with my dad, so I said, 'why don't we do that?'" Devin said. "We didn't actually work off a script. We wrote some things in parentheses (stage directions). The rest we just made up."

Rowan, who played a Mike Wallace-type in one scene, said, "we made up stupid names for each other. It was really funny."

Three of their classmates made a 5-foot-tall slingshot out of a tree stump and lumber. A demonstration showed it was capable of flinging a tennis ball 50 feet.

Other classmates' projects included a doll house, a luggage set, a McDonald's scene made of clay, and a stop-motion Lego movie. And there was a Rube Goldberg machine, which took 41 tries before its creators got a marble to roll as they wanted through a path of chain reactions.

"That's pretty cool that they stuck with it 41 times to achieve their version of success," said their teacher, Michael Bessonette.

Bessonette came up with the idea for Innovation Day, starting it last year with the fourth- and fifth-graders. Principal Kristi Fish decided to expand it to the rest of the school this year.

"It's trial, sometimes error, and learning from your mistakes," Bessonette said. "It's just neat to see what kids are interested in and what they can work with."

Bessonette said he got the idea from some education-related readings, and thought it was worth trying out at Hidden Valley. He compared it to Google's "20 Percent Time," in which the world's biggest Internet company encourages its employees to spend a fifth of their time pursuing projects of their own.

"This is like a condensed version of that, where kids get to create, innovate whatever they're interested in," Bessonette said.

In Diana Sottile's third-grade class, two girls made ziplines for stuffed animals — they held a race between Winnie the Pooh's Tigger, an owl and a minion from the animated movie, "Despicable Me" — while a couple boys in the class started a candy company and made candy kebabs they called "Stomach Ache on a Stick."

Sottile did not immediately allow them to distribute their candy creations to the rest of the class.

Students in third, fourth and fifth grade had the freedom to create on their own, while students in the lower grades were given some parameters.

Kindergartners, for instance, brought rocks to school to be the centerpieces of their projects.

"Their quest was to make it different," Principal Kristi Fish said.

One rock became a car, with wheels glued onto it, while a pair of rocks served as heads in a painting of two people.

Whether it was kindergartners starting with a rock or fifth-graders starting from scratch, Fish said the day gave all the students a chance to celebrate and take ownership of their learning.

"They learn to take risks by creating a project, see what's wrong, and see how they can problem solve," Fish said. "That's what true learning is about."